Based loosely on the classic western True Grit, the original comics focus on a dispirited Kara (Supergirl’s actual name), taking refuge on a distant planet, and becoming embroiled in a dispute between a fierce, young girl named Ruthye, whose family was  brutally murdered by the villain Krem of the Yellow Hills, part of a group of bloodthirsty brigands terrorizing the local planets. When this same Krem shoots and poisons Kara’s beloved dog, Krypto, she and Ruthye track down the pirates together, in a race against time, in order to get the antidote, and settle things up between Ruthye and Krem.

It all feels perhaps a skooch played out, by this point, especially since an enormous percentage of such post-Jaws flicks (including several of the Jaws’ sequels) have been mindless, idiotic moneygrabs, with shameful CGI effects, and a slew of wooden, one-dimensional characters to use as chum in the water. This aggressively bland film is next in a long line of grubby, shoddy and spiritless fare —  in fact, it’s not even the first film to have come up with a plane crash in the Pacific as its primary hook (2024’s No Way Out) . 

It sounds like the set-up to a comedy, and to be sure, writer/director Kristoffer Borgli (himself, the cause of controversy, given his recent admission to dating a teenager when he was a decade older than she), plays a lot of this material for uneasy laughs. The wedding scene itself, at the end, is a sort of culmination of everyone’s bad choices in the most public of spectacles (Charlie makes an absolutely ghastly wedding speech resulting, in part, by him getting his nose broken by an angry guest), with various turns of the screw.